White Jews Play ‘The Race Card’ Against Black Jews

Black Jews have begun to raise their voices about what they perceive as a hypocritical racial duplicity by their White Jewish brethren. They see White European Jews—also known as Ashkenazi Jews—as on the one hand claiming the historical mantle of an oppressed race, but easily toggling back into Whiteness to access the multiplicity of privileges of institutionalized White Supremacy.

Meanwhile, from their advantaged position White Jews deny or ignore the racism faced by Black Jews and make little or no effort to truly ameliorate racism or to upset a racially skewed system from which they derive such profound benefits.

A recent op-ed in the Forward by a Black Jew challenged “White Jews” to stop denying that they are “functionally White” and admit that they are unabashed beneficiaries of White Supremacy. This rather mild criticism generated a most fearsome anti-Black backlash—so much of a firestorm that it closed down online Jewish forums, causing some Black Jews to quit in protest: “I got hateful messages, my black friends and I were called ‘racist c**ts,’ and people outright laughed at my fears.” So volatile was this internecine explosion that the Forward had to take a break from cheerleading Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians to cover the rebellion in an article titled “An Oped About Race Sets Jewish Facebook Aflame.”

Lawyer Micha Danzig, an Israeli army veteran and former New York cop, took strong issue with being labeled “White”—and by a Black Jew, no less. White Jews have debated this “Are-Jews-a-race-or-religion?” issue for years, as recorded in Karen Brodkin’s book “How Jews Became White Folks.” But when Black Jews venture an opinion, all hell apparently breaks loose. After all, Blacks are, according to Israel’s top rabbi, “monkeys.”

In a Forward response titled “No, Ashkenazi Jews Are Not ‘Functionally White,’ ” Mr. Danzig insists that Jews are a separate and distinct “race” that has suffered for their Jewishness. But to make his point and to belittle the Black Jews, Danzig propagandizes a fake Black history, contorting three episodes into unrecognizable remnants of actual events. In fact, when placed back in their proper historical context, all three of his examples demonstrate the very opposite of the Jewish victimhood narrative that he intended to promote. His examples instead show that Jews are among America’s most prominent purveyors of White supremacy and that their vicious and hateful reaction to their own Black “brethren” is—historically—not the least bit surprising.

(1) Walter White

Danzig framed his argument via the case of Walter White, a very light-skinned Black man who could “pass for White” and who became an official in the NAACP, not a “founder” as Danzig misstates. According to Danzig, White “went undercover with the KKK in order to investigate and sometimes prevent lynchings in the South. He was a hero.” In this role, Walter White was undoing what many White-skinned Ashkenazi Jews in the South had worked to establish to secure their place in the cotton-based economic infrastructure. Being well-represented among the major cotton traders of the South, Jews had as much or more to gain than any other White ethnic or religious group in ensuring that the Black man continue in the cotton-producing role he had been in for the previous 300+ years.

Judah P. Benjamin

And that is why the early Gentile leaders of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan sailed all the way to England to secure investment from an exiled Confederate Jewish banker and plantation owner named Judah P. Benjamin. Benjamin had been so effective in arranging Jewish financing for the Confederacy that they put his Ashkenazi face on their $2 bill. When the slavocracy was defeated, Benjamin lost the 140 Blacks he enslaved, and he, like most Southern Whites, saw the KKK as a way to terrorize Blacks and force them back into their former roles on cotton plantations. The Jewish Encyclopedia couldn’t be clearer: “[T]he cotton-plantations in many parts of the South were wholly in the hands of the Jews, and as a consequence slavery found its advocates among them.”

(2) Grant’s Order #11

Danzig believes that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous 1862 Order Number 11, in which he calls for the expulsion of Jews from parts of Tennessee, demonstrates that Jews were oppressed and targeted in America. The expulsion order itself was designed to enforce a trade embargo on the Southern Confederacy—just as the world embargoed and sanctioned the apartheid government of South Africa a century later. Israelis and American Jews were among those who secretly supplied South Africa, the most racist government on earth, with material support and even nuclear weapons—despite world outrage at the violent and repressive anti-Black regime. According to Seymour Hersh, Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzak Rabin “gushed over” South African Prime Minister B.J. Vorster, even though he “belonged to one of the most extreme of the pro-Nazi groups—the Ossewabrandwag.”

And so it was in the case of the Jewish presence in the American Civil War. As soon as Lincoln heard of Grant’s order against Jewish traders, he rescinded it. But we should understand why Grant and those prosecuting the war against the Confederacy were so frustrated with Jewish merchants, traders, and peddlers. Jews were among those Whites attempting (very often successfully) to break the embargo by smuggling cotton out of the South in exchange for gold. This gold was desperately needed to continue the rebellion of the slave states and to continue the slave trade. Danzig apparently expects that we—the descendants of the Black slaves and victims of the slave system these Ashkenazi Jewish merchants were intending to uphold—ignore this incredible Jewish betrayal and see these victimizers as victims?

Ulysses S. Grant

Further, the “vicious anti-Semite” Ulysses S. Grant won the presidential election, taking the majority of the Jewish vote and becoming “one of the greatest friends of Jews in American history.” Danzig, in his futile quest to find “anti-Semites” finds only friends. Meanwhile, Blacks are reviewing Robert Rosen’s much more interesting book “Jewish Confederates,” which is filled with Ashkenazis who were willing to die—to die—to keep the Black man and woman in chains. It is a fat 517 pages long.

(3) The Leo Frank

In his third historical delusion, Danzig writes, “In Georgia, in 1915, Leo Frank was wrongly convicted of a crime and lynched because he was Jewish.” Danzig is here relying on White Ashkenazi “historians” who for 100 years have fabricated much of the Leo Frank story for the very purpose that Danzig now uses it—to convince uninformed Blacks that the lynching of a single Ashkenazi Jew for a murder he did in fact commit outweighs 360 previous years of Jewish slave-trading, KKK involvement, and Jim Crow collaboration. The Leo Frank case (which began in 1913, not 1915 as Danzig again misstates) is notable because it is credited with initiating the ADL, the racist forerunner of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO operation.

B’nai B’rith leader Leo Frank was the Harvey Weinstein of his era. He ran a pencil factory filled with adolescent Gentile girls, many of whom testified under oath that Frank often sexually harassed them. Frank cornered 13-year-old machine operator Mary Phagan, who resisted, and in the struggle he raped and killed her. And just as Harvey Weinstein hired Israel Mossad agency Black Cube to clean up his mess and tarnish his accusers, Leo Frank hired two nationally known private investigation firms to help him pin the crime on two Black men. Ultimately, both detective agencies were unwilling to corrupt themselves and they publicly stated that Frank was guilty of the murder.

Danzig couldn’t have picked someone—Jew or Gentile—better suited to prove the utter Whiteness of Ashkenazi Jews. At his trial for the murder of Mary Phagan, Leo Frank’s attorneys castigated Black witnesses as “niggers” and demanded that the jury dismiss all “negro testimony” because it came from “negro” mouths. They railed about the “smell of negroes” and argued that Frank, a White man, could not have committed the murder because murder “was a negro crime.”

Danzig should have just consulted the Forward’s own archives, wherein founder Abraham Cahan interviewed Leo Frank himself and quoted the convicted murderer directly: “Anti-Semitism is absolutely not the reason for this libel that has been framed against me. It isn’t the source nor the result of this sad story.”

Danzig presents these cases as “proof” of Jewish victimhood in America. Yet all three prove that Ashkenazi racism is at the very core of the American Jewish experience. Black Jews are now realizing that to embrace White Ashkenazi Jews means they are embracing their own oppression. Their utterly mild Black observations of White Jewish attitudes were met with the most unprintable racial filth, not from David Duke or Richard Spencer or Mahmoud Abbas but from lily-White Ashkenazi readers of the Forward—their own “family.”

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has always maintained that a proper relationship with Jews must begin with an honest dialogue about how one people’s actions have harmed another. To simply deny that such a history of harm exists and that any other Black point of view is “anti-Semitic,” has been the arrogant Ashkenazi position against Black people and the Minister for 34 years. In their identically hateful reaction to the experiences and earnest opinions of Black Jews, White Jews have only helped prove that there is simply no Ashkenazi respect for Blacks of whatever faith, no matter how reasoned their points of view.

Once Black Jews become aware of the massive role their Ashkenazi brethren have played on the oppressor side of the color line—and we have only scratched the surface here—it will give Blacks of the Jewish faith a new meaning for the Jewish seder tradition of leaving the door open for Elijah.